Warren Sedillo

You are wearing Leonard Braswell's hands when you decide, and that's the thing that finally does it — those hands, ropey and scarred at the knuckle, smelling permanently of brake cleaner no matter how long since the last job. Leonard's shop closes at three on Mondays. You have been him less than a minute, the site still says, but you already know the whole shape of the boredom coming: the same truck bed, the same radio station, the same ex-wife who calls about the same son. Six hundred and fifty-nine men behind you and you can feel this one's Monday afternoon stretching out like a bay door. You open the site again on Leonard's phone, thumb — his thumb — hovering over the wheel, and you tell yourself it's just to see. It is never just to see. You spin.

The spoon is already turning the other way before you understand your hand did it. Onions catch the light going one direction, then the other, a small violent correction, and you salt the pan without tasting it because your mouth doesn't know yet that it's a mouth. Behind you a studio apartment kitchen holds its breath — fluorescent tube humming over the stove, spice jars in a crooked row, a Polaroid or two curling on the fridge door under a Houston Livestock magnet. Your feet are planted at an angle Leonard's never stood at. You reach up without deciding to and take down a second plate, and set it beside the first one already on the counter, and something in the wrist that did that has no idea why.

It's the shirt that gives him to you first — not this shirt, the gray T-shirt with the collar gone soft, but the ghost of a green chambray it remembers being, sleeves rolled twice, forearms freckling brown to the elbow and white above. Nursery light, close and wet-aired, the smell of cut stems and chlorine tablets in bucket water. Warren Sedillo, thirty years at a wet bench two miles from here, hands that know rose thorns the way other men's hands know a socket wrench — where to grip so it doesn't bite. The shirt remembers being buttoned this morning, one-handed, in a bathroom mirror with a crack across one corner, remembers him not looking at himself doing it, the sleeves rolled because there's no roses today, just the Monday order and the delivery van and Ruth at the register asking if he's eating.

The sweatpants are more recent, an hour old at most, and they bring back changing out of work jeans that had gone stiff with floor water, the particular relief of that, the couch groaning the way it's groaned since he brought it up the stairs alone nine years ago. Divorced eleven years now, though it doesn't feel like a wound anymore so much as a room he doesn't go into. Three kids — Danny in Austin doing something with servers, the twin girls, Priya and Marisol, one married, one who calls more, both of them just far enough that this is a Monday he cooks for one and it doesn't wreck him the way it used to. He'd wanted, this morning, buttoning that shirt in the cracked mirror, to call Denise. The old girlfriend, not the ex-wife — Denise, seven years gone and still the one his mind walks to when the shop's quiet, when a bucket of ranunculus makes him think of the ones she used to buy herself on a Friday for no reason, just because. He didn't call her. He never does. He thought about it the way he thinks about most things now, turning it over once like checking a stem for rot, and put it down.

The spoon in your hand is Warren's exactly, worn to his grip, and it brings the taste he isn't tasting tonight — garlic going translucent, the smell that means eight, nine minutes more — and under that, further down, the ache that lives in both his shoulders from forty years of reaching into coolers, the way his jaw is already tight, clenched around nothing, the way it clenches every night whether or not there's anything to clench about. Sleep will be bad again tonight, the machine on the nightstand humming its rubber-hose hum, mask leaving a red line across his cheekbones by morning. None of that is in the room yet. Right now there's just the pan, the second plate he doesn't remember deciding to set out, and the two dents in the linoleum where a third chair used to be, years back, before there was only him at this counter more nights than not.

You look down. The hand holding the spoon has a burn scar he didn't earn and calluses along the first two fingers you didn't build, and it is not shaking, which almost disappoints you. You set the spoon across the rim of the pan the way it seems to know how to be set. You look up, past the spice jars, into the dark window over the sink where a man is looking back at you who has just, without any memory of it, laid out dinner for someone who isn't coming.

"Ruth," you say to the glass, to no one, "I should call and see if she's eating too" — his ex-wife's name arriving in your mouth before you've decided to want it there, and behind it, quieter, six hundred and sixty spins deep, the old itch already stirring, wondering how long a florist in Houston keeps a man interested, and not answering.